672
PARTISAN REVIEW
summed up, nor even greatly illuminated, by saying that their aims
are one. It is true only insofar as they both desire better working con–
ditions and useful only insofar as they unite their strength as work–
ers to achieve these ends. Further than this we cannot in honesty go.
In this climate Wright's voice first was heard and the struggle
which promised for a time to shape his work and give
it
purpose
also
fixed it in an ever more unrewarding rage. Recording his days
of anger he has also nevertheless recorded, as no Negro before
him
had ever done, that fantasy Americans hold in their minds when
they speak of the Negro: that fantastic and fearful image which
we have lived with since the first slave fell beneath the lash.
This
is the significance of
Native Son
and also, unhappily, its over–
whelming limitation.
Native Son
begins with the
Brring!
of an alarm clock in the
squalid Chicago tenement where Bigger and his family live. Rats live
there too, feeding off the garbage, and we first encounter Bigger in
the act of killing one. One may consider that the entire book, from
that harsh
Brring!
to Bigger's weak "Good-by" as the lawyer, Max,
leaves
him
in the death cell, is an extension, with the roles inverted,
of this chilling metaphor. Bigger's situation and Bigger himself exert
on the mind the same sort of fascination. The premise of the book
is, as I take it, clearly conveyed in these first pages: we are con–
fronting a monster created by the American republic and we are,
through being made to share his experience, to receive illumination
as regards the manner of his life and to feel both pity and horror
at his awful and inevitable doom. This is an arresting and potentially
rich idea and we would be discussing a very different novel if
Wright's execution had been more perceptive and if he had not at–
tempted to redeem a symbolical monster in social terms.
One may object that it was precisely Wright's inten–
tion to create in Bigger a social symbol, revelatory of social
disease and prophetic of disaster. I think, however, that it is this
assumption which we ought to examine more carefully. Bigger has
no discernible relationship to himself, to his own life, to
his
own
people, nor to any other people- in this respect, perhaps, he is most
American-and his force comes, not from his significance as a social
(or anti-social) unit, but from his significance as the incarnation
